John Jonas says business owners hesitate to hire a Filipino specialist because they underestimate how much work they can delegate. Start with hourly work to test, then expand tasks as you see what they can handle. The real problem is owners doing too much themselves, not lack of work.
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Welcome to the Secret Sauce of Outsourcing podcast that's dedicated to making you better at working with OFS online Filipino specialists. This is episode 308. You're not sure if you can keep an OFS busy. So this is one of the questions I get really consistently from people is I'm not sure if I can keep someone busy. Should I hire someone or not? It's also one of the answers I get from people when I ask, like, hey, why. Why haven't you hired someone yet? I. Oh, because I don't think I can keep someone busy full time. I don't have enough work to keep them busy. I don't know if I'm ready to keep someone busy. Okay, so I can understand because this was, this was one of my hesitations in the very beginning. I didn't know if I could keep someone busy. I had other concerns. I didn't know if I could afford it. I didn't know if they could actually do good work. Keeping them busy full time wasn't. I mean, it was definitely one of my primary concerns because at the time, the only option was for me to hire someone full time. Now, you can hire someone part time, or you can hire someone hourly, or you can hire someone full time or salary or not. There's any option, whatever you want to do, it's completely available to you because of onlinejobs. Ph. However, let me just talk to the I don't know if I can keep someone busy yet thought process. To me, that answer means you haven't really caught the vision yet of what this can be. To me, it means you're doing all the work yourself and you think you're the only one who can do that work. Or like you're the, I mean, you're the only one in the world who's, who's capable of doing that, which, you know, probably isn't really correct in most situations. And what I've seen over the years is when someone doesn't really, really think they can keep someone busy full time or part time or whatever it is, then they hire someone. Usually. Here's what happens. You give them their first task and they work through that task with you, and you start to see what they're really capable of. Then they'll start to tell you what other things they can do, what their skills they have, what ideas they have so that they can gain your trust and have better job security because they really want to keep their job. Then they want to ask you for training on other tasks that they can do for you, because it shows you that they're eager to learn and they're eager to do work, and they're eager to keep their job, which means better job security. And I've seen this process happen to me, and I've seen it happen to quite a few other people. When you hire someone, like, you're expecting to only outsource one task, and then you outsource that one thing, and then you realize, oh, if they did that, well, then I could also give them this. And then they do that thing. And then like, oh, I have this other thing. And then, then you're getting three things done. And then pretty soon you realize, I need another, I need another ofs. And more and more and more, you start to get things off of your plate. And pretty soon you've caught the vision. To me, I don't know if I have enough work to keep someone busy is a vision problem, not a delegation problem. Because as soon as you start implementing one or two tasks that you're not the one doing it, you start to get things off of your plate. You start to realize, oh, there are more things that I could be doing that I'm not doing. You start to hand those things off, your marketing improves, your sales improves, you start generating better leads for the business. You're doing things that you've never done done before because you didn't think that those things were possible because you didn't have enough time to get those things done. Everything starts to snowball after you outsource that one first task. So if you're not hiring someone because you're not sure if you have enough work for them to do, try this. Try hiring someone hourly. It completely keeps you off the hook. If you give them two hours of work in a week, that's all they need. That's all they get. If you give them 22 hours of work in a week, well, then sweet for them. This at least allows you to try this and see what happens. However, just be careful. Here's my experience with this. If you hire someone hourly, it lets you off the hook, meaning you don't have to change the way you're running your business. You can continue to be the grunt worker and just kind of add another grunt worker is what I often see. You hand off one task, but you keep all these other tasks to yourself, because if you don't keep them busy, then it doesn't really matter to you. And so, yeah, you probably don't have enough to keep them busy because you don't need to keep them busy. And it doesn't really matter. Whereas if you hire someone, let's say just part time for four hours a day, and you're responsible to keep them busy and you only have an hour and a half of work per day. What I've seen over and over and over again is you start to think differently as the CEO of the business. Like, what else could we do to, to keep this person busy? Oh, well, we've thought about doing email marketing, so maybe they could help us with our email system. Or we've thought about doing SEO for a really long time and we have this SEO training that we can get from vasmadeeasy.com, let's start having them do SEO for us also. And pretty quickly you start to realize, oh my gosh, that four hours a day was not anywhere close to enough. I really need a full time person. But if you don't want to do that, hire someone hourly and just give it a shot and see what happens when you have someone that you can delegate to. You start to change your thinking, change your vision. Still have other questions about hiring someone in the Philippines? Check out ofsguide.com where I will answer your questions.
